Date Abstract Report Received

Investigation

Funded By

Some analytical methods that have recently been developed and applied to other species and diseases could be useful, if applied to PRRSV routinely collected data, to create the foundations for a risk-scoring systems that will help us to identify emerging strains and anticipate the risk for PRRSV outbreaks. In this project, we demonstrated the combined use of temporal, spatial, and phylogenetic analysis of PRRSV sequences to demonstrate that application. In the analyzed dataset, we were able to identify distinct patterns for emerging, compared to native, field strains, and the combined analysis of location and date when the outbreaks occurred, and genetic characteristics of the viruses, helped us to identify patterns of virus spread. The novelty of this project is that those tools, developed by others and applied in academic settings, were never combined and demonstrated as a potential real-time field application. These results create the foundations for the implementation of an analytical pipeline to routinely collected data (for example, from veterinary diagnostic laboratories, or through Dr. Morrison’s Swine Health Monitoring Program, MSHMP) to early predict and, hopefully, anticipate PRRSV spread in near real time.